Maria and I are forever coming to terms with the holidays, a time of enormous stress and anxiety for us and for so many other people. Today, she wrote about her struggles to come to terms with the holidays on her blog. I have written about mine for years. Last year, I deeply upset some (former) friends with my writing about Christmas and the great difficulty so many people had with finding the true meaning of the holidays.
So often, I hear people speak of the holidays with dread. We don’t know any of those perfect families who have joyous and happy holidays, I hope there are many. One friend horrified me by posting a photo online of her extended family – scores of them – all dressed up as green elves for Christmas morning.
Bless them, I would rather plunge naked into a freezing stream in January. Maybe they are the perfect family Disney and all those ad agencies have been talking about.
No wonder we spend so much time shopping and trawling for discounts.
Every year, Maria and I seek to reinvent our experience of the holidays, and slowly but sure we are making progress. We both gave up spending holidays with our families, and they, in turn, have given up spending the holidays with us. Life goes on.
It is an unfortunate thing, this breaking way from our traditions, but it seems to work.
People like us live in fear of obligation and unyielding tradition, we find it threatening and suffocating. We find it traumatic to submit to things we are supposed to submit to. We could, like normal people, just go and pretend. We can’t.
If we can’t be accepted for who we are, then we can’t participate. Too often for me, the holidays are about subsuming identity and struggling to please people who can never be pleased. And those family rituals just didn’t feel good for us.
The holidays are not about compassion or generosity, they are not about not being known. Rather, they are about being pressured to worry too much about presents and money and what other people want. I greatly appreciate the true Jesus and his passion for forgiving and protecting and comforting the poor, I rarely see his true spirit and teachings in the Christmas we practice.
I understand and respect the fact that Christmas has different and happier meanings for many people. I wish them the greatest and most meaningful of holidays. I can handle being a freak.
My heart also goes out, as usual, to the people for whom the “perfect” Disney idea of Christmas is a myth, an unreachable mountain peak and a depressing symbol of the reality of many lives. A true holiday should not be so depressing. Perhaps there are just too many gifts no one can afford to buy, too many families pretending to be whole.
So many people suffer greatly during the holidays. Christmas is as fraught as it is joyous, and I happen to love the holiday, although it was always bittersweet for me.
My family, first generation Jewish immigrants from Russia celebrated Christmas – or at least part of Christmas – secretly and excessively. We had big trees, scores of presents and spent manic days before the holiday shopping, wrapping, anticipating. There was always a dreadful crash after Christmas, almost nothing can live up to its over-hyped expectations.
In retrospect, I see my family’s Christmas as an almost desperate act of assimilation into American life, as poignant as it was impossible. We were not fooling anyone but my grandmother, from whom we hid our holiday celebration with Smiley-like spy craft. She would not have liked it, I think she always understood that the real act of assimilation for Jewish immigrants was to celebrate their own holidays, not those of other faiths.
My own Christmas is an evolution. I do like to mark the birthday of Christ, I wish he were still around, he would burn some temples of ours in a big hurry. He would remind us to listen to our better angels.
I have learned to love Jesus without worshiping him, and his values are what I choose to embrace and celebrate at Christmas. Maria hates to get presents on Christmas, and I hate not to give her some, we are working out various compromises. We will not have a tree, but will string some lights around the porch and the farmhouse.
This year, I proposed that we rent a motel room just a few miles away for one night during the holidays and go there to read, make love, talk and find some funky diner to eat on. I know it is a crazy idea, but it won’t go away. Perhaps it will fade.
It seems ridiculous to rent a motel room 20 minutes a way, but it is also appealing to both of us. Fortunately, we are strange in similar ways.